“I never blamed him though. Not at all. In fact, I was so grateful, because he encouraged me to get medical help when I’d previously been too embarrassed to ask for it,” said Sarah. “I did all the appointments. The group sessions, eventually the medication. It did help with the anxiety and in turn the panic attacks, but as those things got a bit better, I still found myself wanting to be at home more and more. I tried to put it down to being tired, but I think I knew all along something wasn’t right.”
She explained that the first episode was nowhere near as dramatic as what happened in the grocery store three days ago, but it had still signaled the onset of a problem which at the time she was completely unaware could threaten to change her life so significantly. “I had an appointment scheduled over in West Pokona, the same kind of appointment I’d attended on a weekly basis without issue, when I first experienced the paralysis of agoraphobia. I made it all the way to the counsellor’s office, but when I got there I just couldn’t get out of the car. I sat there for ten minutes, just crying, and I couldn’t move from the driver’s seat, until a full-blown panic attack set in.”
Sarah told Jane that while her panic attacks had increased slowly over time, her agoraphobia was not so forgiving. It rose sharply inside her from that moment on, and so started her first period of being totally housebound. For nearly two weeks she didn’t even try to overcome it. So strong was her fear of having a panic attack in a public place, she had just resolved to stay in her house until someone, predictably Jason, deemed that enough was enough and she simply had to leave the house.
“Jason never forced me, but he did urge me to try and get out. He even took a day off work and suggested we go for a walk around the neighborhood after he’d taken the kids to school. I tried, but I didn’t get past the end of the driveway. I just got to a certain point and my legs wouldn’t move. Jason tried his best to help, but after about a minute with tears rolling down my face, I just turned for the house and ran,” Sarah said.
That had put an end to her attempts for another month or so, but she hadn’t been completely useless or bed-ridden in that time. She was doing a lot of reading on-line and had even, with Jason’s prompting and assistance, spoken to her counsellor numerous times by phone rather than attending her office.
“The next twelve months were probably the hardest for me. Between myself and my therapist, even other doctors that I spoke to, we tried scaling back the medications but the panic attacks would get worse. So we’d try different medications to get them in line again but no matter what combination and dosage we used, the agoraphobia had apparently dug in and wasn’t going anywhere. We tried exposure therapy – this is basically how it sounds – if you have a fear, you slowly try to face it rather than facing it in one big hit. It would start with a walk around the block with Jason, then doing it by myself. If that went well, I would try going in the car with Jason when he dropped the kids at school. There was even a few periods where I was doing that myself. There would be quick trips to the shops which required a lot of planning. It would never just be jumping in the car and going to the shops to see what I could find – there was always a specific purpose, like ‘I am driving to McCalls to buy a specific book, and then coming straight home’, and I would even call the bookstore that morning to ensure they had the book I wanted. Basically just ticking every box to make sure nothing could go wrong and I could stick to the plan.”
“That makes sense. It sounds hard, but I guess that’s the only way to deal with something like that,” Jane had been listening intently the whole time, letting Sarah do most of the talking. She had appointed herself the job of topping up the glasses, but by this stage the wine was only survived by two empty bottles on the counter and her next job was to replace the wine glasses in front of them with a bottle of beer each.
“Yeah, when it was all planned out, it was easier, but honestly it was just a horrible rollercoaster way to live. I would go for a couple of months doing really well with the exposure therapy, and although there would be no panic attacks in public, the attacks were happening more at home, out of the blue, and that would put me right back to square one. I think in that twelve months the longest I spent housebound was four months at a time, and the longest I spent successfully getting out into the world again was maybe two months at a time. It was just up and down, up and down. I’d think I was getting over it, convince myself all the strategies and coping mechanisms were working and I was recovered, and then I’d find all the progress washed away in an instant,” by this stage Sarah had lost her inhibitions while telling her story, and she wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol, or just the fact that she felt comfortable with Jane and the words came easier the longer she talked. She figured it was a good mixture of both.
“The thing that a lot of people would never think about or understand with agoraphobia, is all the associated mental damage it does to people. I mean, we’re not all lonely old women living in a one bedroom house with a couple of cats. People suffer from it at all different stages of life. For me, it came at a time that should have been the best years of my life. I had a loving husband, two beautiful children who adored me and I adored back tenfold, I had friends who felt like sisters to me. From the outside, I really had nothing to worry about. Life was great – but the demons in my head didn’t care about the outside view – they only cared about the havoc they could wreak on the inside.
“So, while it might sound like the worst part of all this was having the panic attacks and not being able to leave the house, the torment runs a lot deeper. At times it was like I was watching a movie of my own life, and I could see everything slipping further and further away from me. Because of the problem I had, I basically missed seeing my kids grow up. They were there, and I was with them before and after school, but I could count on one hand the amount of times I was able to go to a sports carnival, or a ballet performance for little Lizzy. I missed all of that, and it ate away at me every single day. Every moment that was important to them, I couldn’t be part of and every time I couldn’t see Lizzy do a performance, or go to Noah’s class on parent’s day, it felt like another little part of me died inside,” Sarah’s voice rose a little, and there was almost anger there now. Anger at what had been taken away from her by the illness. She noticed it herself, and took a breath before continuing.
“So, I felt useless as well. I couldn’t be a proper mother to my kids, Jason would have to make excuses for me at every parent-teacher meeting, every social event through his work. I didn’t want him to miss those, but I wouldn’t blame his co-workers for wondering if Jason had completely made up his married life, because they never saw any evidence of it. I guess people nowadays would write it off as depression, but depression is more of a chemical imbalance. The way I felt was more a by-product of every other imbalance I obviously had. I had no self-worth at all. Sometimes I was angry at myself for being weak, other more rational times I was angry at the illness itself, and then I’d get angry at the doctors who couldn’t cure me. I wanted a magic needle they could give me to fix everything, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen.
“There was also no shortage of times I would plead with Jason to take the kids and leave me, but he never did, and for that I was grateful. I probably didn’t even mean it when I said it – maybe it was my way of fishing for reassurance that he was never going to leave. Pushing him to promise he would always be by my side no matter what,” Sarah raised the beer bottle to her mouth and took a sip, then tilted it up again before she even moved it from her lips. She knew Jane had initially asked about her kids, and she had now spent over an hour talking about everything except Noah and Lizzy. There was a sense of longing growing inside her, a sadness born from the ashes of the anger she had just been able to hose down. She excused herself for a toilet break, and Jane started clearing some plates and empty glasses. Sarah didn’t stop her, figuring it would be awkward just sitting alone in the kitchen staring at the wall. When she returned to the kitchen, Jane was back in her seat,
sipping her beer.
“Sarah, you’ve been through so much. If you don’t want to keep talking, it’s totally alright.”
Sarah lowered herself to her chair and took another sip of her beer. “No, it’s fine. I just still get a bit angry about everything I guess. That’s the problem with the illness I have. There’s nobody to blame. If I’d been hit by a drunk driver and ended up in a wheelchair, at least I would have someone to direct my hate at, but there’s nobody I can point a finger at and say ‘You did this to me’.”
It was something she had thought about a lot. Who was to blame for how things turned out? As far as she knew, there was no history of mental illness in her family. No hereditary clues to solve the puzzle. Through all her therapy sessions there was also no discernible event in her life that caused it either. Like the fog that had hung over Calston during the past three days, it was just there.
“I think we might need something stronger to keep going, though,” Sarah continued with half a grin. It was a look that said she was trying to remain light-hearted, but she was moments away from reliving things she wasn’t sure she wanted to dig up again.
Jane nodded, her face almost sympathetic, as though she had read Sarah’s emotions precisely. They both stood and walked to the kitchen counter. Sarah pulled two smaller glasses from the cupboard next to the fridge while Jane took a tray of ice blocks from the freezer. They both sat back at the table with their glasses of bourbon on ice, Sarah’s deliberately containing more bourbon than Jane’s.
“So, late in 2009,” Sarah continued, her voice growing heavy with a tiredness that wasn’t present before, and she was being vaguer than the story deserved. “It was November 28, 2009.”
She couldn’t pretend this was just another story, and couldn’t tell it in the way you would tell a story of a camping trip too many years ago to remember specifics. This was one memory where she was painfully aware of the specifics.
“I’d been pretty good for a month or so, I’d been taking the kids to school by myself and getting to spend a lot more time with them as a result, even taking them down to Waterson’s to play after school a couple of times a week so I could update Mel and Josie on my progress. They had lives of their own, but they had still been pretty good at keeping in contact to see how I was. Aside from Jason, they were the only other people I’d told about what I was going through and they’d been supportive.
“It was a Saturday, and after sticking to my exposure therapy for a while, hitting milestones right where I had planned them with my therapist – doing groceries, eating at a restaurant, those sorts of things - it was the first time I planned to have a more extended period away from home. We’d discussed it a lot in my therapy sessions and built up to it, and agreed it was time to try a whole afternoon and evening at Mel’s place for sort of a girl’s night. There was a still a set schedule. Arrive at midday to have lunch - Josie would be there too, and they’d arranged babysitters so we could have the whole day and night to ourselves. After lunch we would go for a walk around Waterson’s Park. The walking track took about an hour to get all the way around, so that was easy to plan around. Next on the itinerary was an afternoon and evening watching movies, and I was to be home by 10:00p.m. so I could still sleep in comfortable surroundings. To make it easy, we would order pizza for dinner. When I look back, it must have been frustrating for the two of them, having to run their day to a precise schedule to fit in with me and my needs, but they seemed happy to do it. I think they were pleased to see a bit more of the old me.
“I was nervous as hell, I don’t mind admitting it. Not about seeing Mel and Josie, they were my closest friends, but just the whole idea of being with other people for so long. If I did have a panic attack, I couldn’t just go and hide in my bedroom like I could at home. I’d be lying if I said I was a hundred percent comfortable, but we had built up to this moment slowly, and once again, I thought I was on the road to recovery,” Sarah’s voice trailed off with these last words, her tone seemingly taking on the emotions of the up and down nature of her illness through that period. She drank again, and realized her glass was now just a pile of ice. Sarah noticed that the bottle of bourbon was sitting in the middle of the table rather than on the kitchen counter, and thought Jane must have foreseen this moment. Pouring the brown liquid into her glass, she stared intently as it rolled in between the fresh ice cubes, leaving colored streaks on each block before it gathered in a rising pool at the bottom, eventually lifting the ice.
“Anyway, the day went exactly to plan. I almost felt normal again, and maybe I would have if not for the strict schedule we had to keep. If anything, it was counter-productive, serving as a constant reminder there was something wrong with me. I feel like that day would have gone better if we didn’t have the plan, but still, there were no attacks, so I can’t complain about that,” Sarah’s voice, which had briefly cheered up when skimming over the success of the day, now dropped sharply, almost emotionless, the way a cold-hearted sociopath might give his confession after interrogators had almost given up. “Except for what happened next.”
Jane’s face had brightened when Sarah spoke of her girl’s day, seeming to take the cues from her tone of voice, and at that moment a blankness took over her expression. Sarah was now staring straight down into her glass, slowly pushing it around in small circles on the tabletop, carefully and deliberately enough so the ice moved but made no sound on the sides of the glass.
She looked into Jane’s eyes as she continued, hoping the challenge of holding her gaze would keep her from breaking down.
“I saw the lights before I got there. Our house wasn’t a farm or anything, but it had some empty land around it and the houses in our street were fairly spread out. I guess you could call it semi-rural,” there was more space forming between Sarah’s sentences now, and the way she spoke would have started to seem disturbing, if not for the look on her face. The way her eyes had glazed over from the tears that were obviously building behind them.
“I saw the Pokona Fire Department truck first, it was bigger than everything else, but there were two police cars there too. I knew even before I got there it was my house they were parked outside. The red and blue police lights flickered and merged into the red fire truck lights – it was just a mass of pulsating colors until I got close enough to see the blackness. It’s what I remember most, that empty, black hole in the world where my life once was. The house was gone, apart from some of the bigger structural beams still standing upright. Most of them had other bits of charred and broken house leant up against them, piles of bricks around the base. They had obviously just crumbled when the walls behind them fell. Or maybe they exploded under the heat. Can bricks explode? I never found out. But they were black anyway. It was all just black, not even any burning embers left. The fire fighters had hosed them down, although I remember thinking the embers were probably the only thing they did put out with their hoses. It looked like the rest of the house must have been gone before they even arrived. So it was just those horrible black ruins with smoke still swirling into the air from the remains.”
Sarah broke now, the tears falling in tiny rivers down each side of her face, but she had to go on, although the mixture of horror, sadness and empathy on Jane’s face told her she really didn’t need to keep talking. She’d wager that Jane was smart enough to put Sarah’s current single white female status together with the story of arriving home to find her house burned to a black, ashen mess and conclude that her family didn’t escape the blaze.
“I’ll never know how they didn’t get out,” she continued through the tears, but still holding the sobbing at bay while she spoke with obvious distress. “I can only guess when it started, the fire must have blocked the exits before Jason could round up the kids. If I…..if I’d been there, maybe…” She lost control and couldn’t finish the sentence.
Jane reached across the small table, navigating her hands past her own glass and Sarah’s, and gripped both of her hands tightly, gently prying one
away from the glass of bourbon.
It wasn’t what Jane said that comforted Sarah the most, but rather what she didn’t say. Jane was stunned by what she had just heard, and had no idea what to say. At that moment, there was a million things whirring around in her head but when she couldn’t decide on the right words, she stuck with saying nothing at all. Aside from a somewhat messy relationship break up with her boyfriend, Jane hadn’t really experienced any great tragedy in her life and felt incredibly ill-equipped to deal with what Sarah had just told her.
From Sarah’s point of view though, Jane’s lack of experience with such things worked in her favor. She didn’t want sympathy, and didn’t want to hear the obligatory ‘It’s OK, it will be alright’ from anybody. It was one of those things that just fell out of people’s mouths at times like this, even when both parties were agonizingly aware it wasn’t OK, and it was never going to be alright. The way she saw it, when Jane stood up and put her arms around her in a slightly awkward sideways hug, she had been able to do what someone with twenty years of crisis counselling experience may not be able to do. She truly made Sarah feel safe. She let her head fall sideways into Jane. There were no words spoken between the two, just the sounds of Sarah’s sobbing, and silent tears escaping from Jane’s eyes as she comforted her new friend.
Sarah didn’t cry for long, and when she pulled away from Jane’s arms after a minute or so, she looked up and both of them shared the briefest bit of laughter. Jane’s laugh was carefully sensitive, more of a nervous laugh acknowledging she felt a little foolish for still crying when Sarah had calmed down. Sarah’s laugh wanted to be hearty but she just didn’t have the energy. It came out more as a ‘look at the pair of us’ laugh, a result of the mental exhaustion which had swept over her quickly once she had finally broken down.
Sarah Before Page 8
